House to Astonish Episode 126
It’s our last episode before our big live show (which, in case you’ve missed our many, many reminders about it, is on May 31 at the City Cafe in Edinburgh, with tickets on sale now – at this link – for £12 and granting you entry to the live podcast, a buffet and the House to Astonish Comics Quiz, where there are bags of prizes to be won). We’re talking about Superior Spider-Man issues 32 and 33, Steven T Seagle and Mark Dos Santos’s Imperial, the new movie Batman costume, the trailers for Constantine and The Flash and the general state of the comics TV union for 2014/2015. We’ve also got reviews of Original Sin, Justice League United and United States of Murder, Inc. and the Official Handbook of the Official Handbook of the Marvel Universe has a brave new world to sell you. All this plus Josie and the Pussybats, a human turducken and Doris the tealady’s cybernetic leg.
You can find the podcast here, or here on Mixcloud, or available via the embedded player below. Let us know what you think, in the comments, via email, on Twitter or via our Facebook fan page. Don’t forget too that our beautiful Redbubble store has all the House to Astonish clothing you could ever require, plus some besides.
Charts – 11 May 2014
“That One Fella, He’s Trouble” – Savage Wolverine #18
With this issue, Savage Wolverine drops its format of rotating creative teams with each arc, and brings us a standalone story by Jen Van Meter and Rich Ellis. Van Meter’s a name I haven’t heard in quite some time – she’s best known for the Oni series Hopeless Savages, but that was a good while back.
Savage stories don’t have to take place in present day continuity, which gives the freedom to do stories set throughout the twentieth century. That’s clearly something that attracts a lot of writers, and here we have another historical story. It’s 1963, and there’s tension in a small town because the local bigots want to stop some people who aren’t white from going to a rally. Logan is passing through and sorts it out. Boil it down and that’s basically the plot.
Origin II
The first Wolverine Origin miniseries came out some twelve years ago, and time has not greatly altered my feelings about it. In a nutshell, the nicest thing to be said about Origin is that it can be easily ignored, because although it ads some pointless complications to the character’s history, none of them seem to matter sufficiently to require mentioning again. But of course, the very fact that it can be so easily ignored is testament to how ineffective it is as an origin story.
Kieron Gillen and Adam Kubert’s Origin II gestures towards keeping the tone of the earlier series, but fortunately doesn’t have to mess about with country house costume drama. It also comes somewhat closer to functioning as an actual origin story, in as much as it takes Logan from an outcast living with wolves in the wilderness through to a status somewhat closer to the way we know him today.
Charts – 4 May 2014
Extreme Rules 2014
For American viewers, we now seem to be firmly in the post-PPV era. The WWE’s website may still list these shows under the heading of “pay-per-views”, but American viewers can get them far more cheaply by subscribing to the Netflix-style “WWE Network”. Would you rather pay $40 just for this show, or subscribe to the whole network for six months at $10 a month? The answer ought to be obvious. Conventional PPV providers are predictably enraged, and the satellite companies (though not the cable ones) have responded by refusing to carry the show at all. If that seems like an odd decision, since any orders are better than none, then bear in mind if they allow WWE to act like this, they encourage other PPV providers to follow suit.
Initial Network subscription numbers are at the low end of expectations (and certainly at the low end of announced expectations, which always seemed very bullish). One theory is that if you didn’t subscribe for Wrestlemania, you certainly won’t be subscribing for a C-level show like this. Another way of looking at it is that a large chunk of the audience just doesn’t feel comfortable with streaming yet, especially as they haven’t done a particularly great job of promoting all the devices that can access the show. If that’s the position, then the satellite companies’ stance may just encourage more people to take a second look at the Network.
House to Astonish Episode 125
Happy Free Comic Book Day! Paul and I have got over an hour and a half of discussion for you, talking about FCBD itself, the sad passing of Al Feldstein, the changes to the Comixology app, the news from C2E2 (including the death of Wolverine, the Tenth Realm storyline, the new Storm and Star-Lord ongoing series, the 100th Anniversary issues from Marvel, the revival of Dark Horse Presents and the Young Guns 2 initiative) and the Chew animated movie. We’ve also got reviews of Southern Bastards, Batgirl Annual and Amazing Spider-Man, and the Official Handbook of the Official Handbook of the Marvel Universe learns what you should say if someone asks you if you are a god. All this plus the Soule Pole, the digital trees of Luxembourg and Big Paddy’s Corporate Tax Shack.
The podcast is here, or here on Mixcloud, or available through the embedded player below. Let us know what you think, in the comments below, on Twitter, via email or on our Facebook fan page.
Don’t forget to pick up your tickets for the House to Astonish Live show in Edinburgh on May 31 (more information on which can be found here), and remember that we have super-chic shirts available at our Redbubble store.
Charts – 27 March 2014
“Wrath” – Savage Wolverine #14-17
Let’s bring us up to date before the next wave of books comes out tomorrow. (And yes, I’ve given up hope on ever getting round to Wolverine Max any time soon.)
The cover for issue #14 – officially, it’s #14.NOW, but let’s smile and nod and ignore that – is presumably joking with its strap line “From the master of noir, Richard Isanove, comes a thrilling new adventure”. Isanove is best known as a colourist on books like Origin, Dark Tower and 1602; so far as I can recall, this is his first high-profile assignment as a writer or artist.
Still, you can see where the noir tag is coming from.
“Rogue Logan” – Wolverine #1-4
I seem to be slipping behind a bit. So let’s take a quick look at this story, which finished last week. (I’m going to skip the epilogue to the first Amazing X-Men arc, since, well, it’s an epilogue to a story I’ve already reviewed.)
Wolverine is one of the more dubious relaunches of the second wave of Marvel Now, featuring as it does exactly the same writer and no genuine fresh start. Instead, this “new” series actually begins with the second phase of a storyline that started with… well, with the previous relaunch.
